By THOMAS L. FRIEDMANPublished: July 24, 2010

When I first heard on Thursday that Senate Democrats were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil, I remembered something that Joe Romm, the climateprogress.org blogger, once said: The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

Just as the U.S. Senate was abandoning plans for a U.S. cap-and-trade system, this article ran in The China Daily: “BEIJING — The country is set to begin domestic carbon trading programs during its 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) to help it meet its 2020 carbon intensity target. The decision was made at a closed-door meeting chaired by Xie Zhenhua, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission ... Putting a price on carbon is a crucial step for the country to employ the market to reduce its carbon emissions and genuinely shift to a low-carbon economy, industry analysts said.”

A day before the climate bill went down, Lew Hay, the C.E.O. of NextEra Energy, which owns Florida Power & Light, one of the nation’s biggest utilities, e-mailed to say that if the Senate would set a price on carbon and requirements for renewal energy, utilities like his would have the price certainty they need to make the big next-generation investments, including nuclear. “If we invest an additional $3 billion a year or so on clean energy, that’s roughly 50,000 jobs over the next five years,” said Hay. (Say goodbye to that.)

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Making our country more energy efficient is not some green feel-good thing. Retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who was Gen. David Petraeus’s senior logistician in Iraq, e-mailed to say that “over 1,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hauling fuel to air-condition tents and buildings. If our military would simply insulate their structures, it would save billions of dollars and, more importantly, save lives of truck drivers and escorts. ... And will take lots of big fuel trucks (a k a Taliban Targets) off the road, expediting the end of the conflict.”

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The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

Reducing our carbon footprint with the direct purchase of renewable energy

The wind farm, which began operation in December 2009, consists of 100 GE 1.5MW XLE turbines.

Agencies Differ on Oil Sands Pipeline

European Pressphoto Agency Foes of a pipeline that would bring tar-sands oil from Canada demonstrate in Washington.

As we’ve reported, the State Department is considering whether to approve a huge new pipeline called Keystone XL that will bring crude from Canada’s oil sands all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

A new pipeline would vastly expand the amount of oil extracted from Canadian oil sands that is used in the United States – which could be good in terms of energy security.

But environmental groups contend that this oil comes with an unacceptable array of environmental problems, from a relatively heavy production of greenhouse gas emissions to destruction of northern, or boreal, forests.

In a letter to the State Department dated Friday, the federal Environmental Protection Agency for the first time officially weighed in on the decision, describing the State Department’s draft environmental impact statement for the Keystone XL project as inadequate.

It said the government had far more research to conduct and information to collect before it could consider the pipeline proposal.

Among the items agency said it found deficient in the draft environmental impact statement were the discussion of potential greenhouse gas emissions associated with the project, pipeline safety and spill-response planning, as well as the impact on indigenous Canadian communities.

Although the State Department has final say on whether to authorize transboundary pipelines, the E.P.A. gets to comment as a cooperating agency, and its comments will presumably be taken seriously. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to pass judgment on the pipeline this fall, but the reservations expressed by the environmental agency could change that timetable.

Alex Moore of the Washington office of Friends of the Earth said in an e-mail message that the recommendations might ultimately delay the permit process for the pipeline, “as the State Department cannot legally proceed until it has provided the E.P.A. with the information requested.”

TransCanada's FACTS:

First Commercial Deliveries on Keystone Oil Pipeline

 

Just the Facts on Keystone XL:

• Keystone XL offers energy security because it will deliver oil from a reliable energy-trading partner and replace oil imported from undependable and environmentally costly crude oil sources.
  
  
• An independent study has found that the development of the Keystone XL pipeline will create more than 13,000 construction jobs in 2011-2012. It will also:
  • Add more than $20 billion in new spending for the U.S. economy.
• Create more than 118,000 person-years of employment
• Generate an increase of $6.5 billion in the personal income of Americans.
• Produce an increase in gross output (product) of $9.6 billion.
• Pay more than $585 million in state and local taxes in the states along the pipeline route.
  
  
• The Canadian Energy Research Institute has found that the economic impact of oil sands development is expected to lead to the creation of more than 345,000 new U.S. jobs between 2011 and 2015.
  
  
• Keystone XL is environmentally responsible because it will replace U.S. oil imports from the Middle East, Venezuela and Mexico that produce significantly more greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) emissions to deliver by tanker than oil in a pipeline from Canada.
  
  
• Oil sands’ total GHG emissions of 38 megatonnes (Environment Canada 2007) is equivalent to one per cent of emissions from the United States power generation sector. That’s less than 0.1 percent of global GHG emissions, and it has decreased more than 30 percent per barrel since 1990.
  
  
• We operate a pipeline system that is monitored 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year – with hundreds of valves that can be shut off if the flow or pressure dropped.

For more on Keystone and the Keystone Gulf Coast Expansion (Keystone XL), visit www.transcanada.com/keystone

June 11, 2010 1:00pm

By Andrew Ward, Nordic bureau chief

A new nuclear race appears to be brewing in eastern Europe. Fortunately, this one involves reactors rather than weapons.

Three countries have announced firm plans to build nuclear power plants within a relatively small area of the Baltic region.

Lithuania is planning a replacement for the Soviet-era Ignalina reactor shut down last year; Belarus has proposed a reactor just across the border from Lithuania; and Russia is vowing to build one in its Kaliningrad enclave between Lithuania and Poland.A fourth country, Estonia, has also floated tentative plans for a reactor of its own.

Andrius Kubilius, Lithuania’s prime minister, could barely conceal his exasperation with the situation when he spoke to the FT this week. Fears of an energy shortage after the closure of Ignalina have been replaced by concern over a potential future supply glut.

“Even without nuclear they have [electricity] over-capacity in Kaliningrad, so where is the market for them?” he asked.

It seems highly unlikely that all four reactors will be built. So the race is on to establish which of the projects have most credibility.

At stake is not only domestic energy security for each country, but also the ability to make money — and wield regional influence — by exporting electricity to neighbors.

Lithuania’s proposed reactor is supposed to be a regional project co-financed by Poland, Latvia and Estonia, with the power shared among them. But progress has been slow as the Baltic financial crisis has strained public finances.

Estonia’s threat to build its own reactor reflects frustration in Tallinn over the delays to the Lithuanian project and concern that the Baltic states could be left without their own independent nuclear power source.

Kubilius insisted he was “quite confident” the reactor would be built, pointing to a recent joint communiqué by the four countries re-stating their commitment. A tender process is under way to find a strategic investor, with several international companies believed to have expressed interest. A partner is scheduled to be chosen “in the second part of this year”.

“I am quite sure we will be successful,” Kubilius says. “And then it will become clear who is building and who is not building.”